Author: HP McLovincraft

Seeker of rabbit holes. Pessimist. Libertine. Contrarian. Your huckleberry. Possibly true tales of sanity-blasting horror also known as abject reality. Prepare yourself. Veteran of a thousand psychic wars. I have seen the fnords. Deplatformed on Tumblr and Twitter.

Secret Facial Recognition Program Could Cover Every State

America’s law enforcement has been secretly using a facial recognition program that can be used to ID activists and protesters.The first-ever acknowledgement of the program was recently revealed by the Washington Post.

“The court documents are believed to be the first public acknowledgment that authorities used the controversial technology in connection with the widely criticized sweep of largely peaceful protesters ahead of a photo op by President Trump.”

What makes this so troubling are two things. One, it appears to be used by law enforcement nationwide.

As the Washington Post explains, “the case is one of a growing number nationwide in which authorities have turned to facial recognition software to help identify protesters accused of violence.”

And two, this secret law enforcement facial recognition database contains images of at least 1.4 million Americans.

“The case also provides the first detailed look at a powerful new regional facial recognition system that officials said has been used more than 12,000 times since 2019 and contains a database of 1.4 million people but operates almost entirely outside the public view. Fourteen local and federal agencies have access.”

The name of this new facial recognition program is called the “National Capital Region Facial Recognition Investigative Leads System” (NCRFRILS).

A thousand law enforcement agencies could have access to a billion public records.

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Joe Biden, the New York Times, ‘Dark’ Winters, and ‘Terrifying Surges’

In the United States, testing is increasingly convenient to get, plus it’s more and more free. Just a few weeks ago the Wall Street Journal’s Holman Jenkins reported that over 150 million coronavirus tests had been administered in the United States. One guesses that number is dated at this point. That it is, and that the New York Times reports daily about a “raging” coronavirus is arguably related. And it doesn’t take a doctor or statistician to understand this.

Stating what should be obvious, the coronavirus “rages” in the U.S. only insofar as Americans have the curiosity and means to be tested for it. If you test hundreds of millions of people you’re going to happen on lots of cases. And even all those U.S.-based tests likely don’t scratch the surface. As Jenkins pointed out after the Kamala Harris/Mike Pence debate, her lament that 7.5 million Americans had contracted the virus was probably off by something like 70 million.

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Biden’s Pentagon Transition Team Members Funded by the Arms Industry

On Tuesday, Joe Biden released a list of transition teams for the various departments in his future White House. The Pentagon transition team for Biden consists of 23 people, many of whom hail from hawkish think tanks.

The team is led by Kathleen Hicks, who worked in the Pentagon under the Obama administration. Hicks most recent employer is the Cen­ter for Strate­gic and Inter­na­tion­al Stud­ies (CSIS), a think tank that receives contributions from arms makers like Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon, to name a few.

CSIS also receives contributions from governments. The think tank’s top government donors are the US, the UAE, Taiwan, and Japan. Two other CSIS employees are on the transition team; Andrew Hunter and Melissa Dalton, who both worked in the Pentagon under the Obama administration.

CSIS employees author policy papers and Op-Eds that generally call for more US involvement around the world. In August, Hicks co-authored an Op-Ed in The Hill titled, “Pentagon Action to Withdraw from Germany Benefits Our Adversaries,” a piece that slammed Trump’s plan to draw down troops from Germany, which Biden could to call off.

Two members of the transition team come from the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), Susanna Blume, a former Pentagon employee, and Ely Ratner, who served as deputy national security advisor to then-vice president Joe Biden from 2015 to 2017.

CNAS is another think tank that enjoys hefty donations from weapons makers, major corporations, and governments. From 2019 to 2020, CNAS received at least $500,000 from the US State Department and at least $500,000 from Northrop Grumman. Other donors include Google, Facebook, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin.

Three more team members list their latest employer as the RAND Corporation, Stacie Pettyjohn, a wargaming expert, Christine Wormuth, who held a few roles in the Obama administration, and Terri Tanielian, a behavioral scientist.

RAND is another hawkish think tank that receives the bulk of its funding from the US government, including the US Army, Air Force, and Department of Homeland Security. RAND is also funded by the UAE, Qatar, and NATO.

A report from In These Times found at least eight out of the 23 team members come from organizations that receive funding from US weapons makers (not including RAND). Besides the CSIS and CNAS employees listed above, In These Times includes Sharon Burke, who works for New America, Shawn Skel­ly, from CACI International, and Vic­tor Gar­cia, from Rebellion Defense.

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Biden Informed Of Pfizer’s Vaccine News Before Government Health Officials

Former Vice President Joe Biden was informed of Pfizer’s successful coronavirus vaccine news before the nation’s incumbent chief health care administrator, Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar.

“I, as Secretary of Health and Human Services, learned about this from media reports on Monday morning,” Azar said Wednesday during an interview with Washington D.C. radio station WMAL.

On Monday, the pharmaceutical giant announced that its coronavirus vaccine candidate showed to be 90 percent effective in large-scale clinical trials, putting the end of the pandemic that has claimed the lives of almost 250,000 Americans since March on the horizon.

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Justice Department probe ends with no action against prosecutors who oversaw Epstein deal

A Justice Department investigation found that federal prosecutors who oversaw a controversial non-prosecution deal with Jeffrey Epstein in 2008 exercised “poor judgment” but did not break the law, Sen. Ben Sasse said Thursday.

The announcement followed an investigation by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility into the conduct of former federal government lawyers, including ex-Labor Secretary Alex Acosta.

“Letting a well-connected billionaire get away with child rape and international sex trafficking isn’t ‘poor judgment’ – it is a disgusting failure,” said Sasse, R-Neb. “Americans ought to be enraged.”

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